patriots a novel of survival in the coming collapse james wesley, rawles

407 Pages·2009·3.32 MB·English

by  James Wesley, Rawles

Ulysses Press

PATRIOTS

A NOVEL OF SURVIVAL
IN THE COMING COLLAPSE

JAMES WESLEY, RAWLES

U

Copyright © 1990-2009 by JamesWesley,Rawles.Fourth Edition (Expanded).All Rights
Reserved.Any unauthorized duplication in whole or in part or dissemination of this edition by
any means (including but not limited to photocopying,electronic bulletin boards,and the
Internet) will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Published by ULYSSES PRESS
P.O.Box 3440
Berkeley,CA 94703
www.ulyssespress.com

An earlier version of this book,entitled Patriots:Surviving the Coming Collapse,was published by
The Clearwater Press

ISBN:978-1-56975-599-0
Library of Congress Catalog Number 2008911760

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IMPORTANT NOTE TO THE READER
This is a work of fiction.All of the characters (other than public figures),events and settings described in
this novel are imaginary,and all character names and descriptions are fictional.In all cases,any resemblance
between the characters in this novel and real people is purely coincidental.
Real public figures,products,places,businesses,government agencies or other entities are depicted ficti-
tiously in this novel for purposes of entertainment and comment only.No affiliation,sponsorship or
endorsement is claimed or suggested.
This novel is only for the entertainment of the reader and is not intended to be used as a source of infor-
mation or instruction.All activities of the fictional characters in the novel are depicted for storytelling
purposes only.The author and the publisher do not intend the reader to make any use of the contents of
this novel and strongly caution the reader against doing so.
For purposes of a realistic narrative,the author has described various survival techniques and the fabrica-
tion of various devices in detail.However,this book is not meant to take the place of a survival manual and
is not meant to instruct the reader on the fabrication of devices that may be dangerous,illegal or both.
For example,the making and/or possession of the some of the devices and ingredients depicted in this
novel may be illegal in some jurisdictions.Mere possession of the uncombined components and/or ingre-
dients might be construed as a violation of criminal law.Consult your state and local laws!
The case citations contained within this novel do not constitute legal advice.Consult a lawyer if you
have legal questions or need legal advice.
The medical details contained within this novel do not constitute medical advice.Consult a doctor or other
appropriate health professional if you have medical questions or if you need medical or nutritional advice.
The author and publisher shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect
to any injury,loss or damage caused,or alleged to be caused,directly or indirectly,by the contents of this
novel and/or the use of the contents by any person.

a cognizant original v5 release october 10 2010

to my excellent wife,
“The Memsahib”

Acknowledgments

Above all else,it takes faith and friends to survive.I’ve been blessed with a lot of
friends,and they have helped to strengthen my faith in Almighty God.
This novel is dedicated to the not-so-fictional Group: Conor, Dave, Hugh,
Jeff,Ken,Linda,Mary,Meg,P.K.,Roland,and Scott.Keep your powder dry!
My thanks to the readers of SurvivalBlog.com and the many other folks
who encouraged me, who contributed technical details, who were used for
character sketches, and who helped in the editing process:Arne, Barbara, the
Bee Man, Bill L. (with the French Resistance, 1943–1944), Bob “The Soap
Maker,”sharp-eyed Dr.Boris K.,“R.F.Burns,”the HAM wizard,Carolyn,The
Chartist Gnome, Cheryl the Economatrix, Chris the Rocky Mountain Diver,
Commander Zero and his new bride, Dr. Craig in New Zealand, Col.“CRM
Discriminator,”David in Israel,the late Jonathan Davis,Debbie,Pastor Dennis,
1/2 M.O.A.Dick in Orofino,Quiet Donny,Dr.Eric,Fred theValmet-Meister,
Frank in “Nah-lens,” Gayle,“The Glock pro” in Connecticut, Pastor Hale, the
anachronistic H-man, Huff the dynamite shooter,“Joe Clutch,”“John Jones”
in the desert, Kirk and Karen in Montana, “All-Grace-No-Slack-Really-
Reformed” Kris in Oregon, Lance in Moscow, “LVZ” in Ohio, “Froggy”
Mark, Marshall the Cyberpunk, Marvin “The Wordmonger,” “The Mill-
wright,” Nadir, Nick in Australia, Patton, Peter in Switzerland, PPPP- the
Pioche Professional Polymer Pistolero, Preston, Ranier, Roland in Germany,
Rolf and Sandy (both in Washington), Sara the Reenactor, Sherron, Stefan in
Sweden,Tina“The S.C.Clone”in Kooskia,Wes in Boise,and MREWoody.
Thanks also to those who have provided web space,outlets,publicity,moti-
vation, and/or prominent links for my novel: Howard Albertson, Patrick Ales-
sandra, Joseph Ames Jr., Jeff Baker, Billy Beck, Ed Bertsch, BOHICA
Concepts, Bill Brumbaugh, John Bryant, Ammon Campbell, The Christian
Survival Intelligence Network,the late Jeff Cooper,Jim Crews,Captain Dave’s
Survival Page, Richard DeCastro, the late Carla Emery, First Virtual Bank,
Detra Fitch,“The Frugal Squirrel,” The Fraud Information Center, The Gos-
pel Plow, Bob Grenert and the Sacred Covenant Resource Center, Bob Gris-
wold and the staff of Ready Made Resources, Mikael Häggström, Ken
Hamblin,Michael Heinze,Fred Heiser,Richard Horton,Peter Huss,The Staff
of the Idaho Observer, Dean Ing, Devvy Kidd, Mark Koernke, John Leveron,

Acknowledgments

vii

Live Oak Farms, Dr. Lawrence Martin and Lakeside Press, Henry McDaniel,
Mike McNulty, Mike Medintz, The Mental Militia Forums, Patty Neill, Dr.
Gary North, Nick Norwood, Mark Nowell, Michael Panzner, Dr. Ignatius
Piazza, Maj. John Plaster, Jerry Pournelle, Larry Pratt, Project Epsilon, Steve
Quayle, Dr. Norm Resnick, John Ross, “Rourke,” Kurt Saxon, John Stadt-
miller, David Stott, Gabe Suarez, Kurt and Angie Wilson of Survival Enter-
prises, Nancy Tappan, Truth Radio in Delano, Two Toes Consulting and
Design, Ed Wolfe,Weapons Safety, Inc., Tom Woolman, and Aaron Zelman of
Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership.
Thanks to Paul B. and Randy K. for their sharp eyes in editing the pre-
vious edition.
Most importantly,this novel is dedicated to my excellent wife (“The Mem-
sahib”). She has patiently put up with the heaps of supplies in the barn and
garage for twenty-plus years. She suffered through nine months of voluntary
separation while I moved to Idaho alone to pound nails and write the first draft
of the novel.She cheerfully joined me for the following eighteen months with
no running water, living amidst Sheetrock dust in a half-finished house. She
helped fill the chest freezer with her livestock,garden produce,and wild game.
She “wrote the book” (or at least the chapter) on home birth. Most of all, I
praise her for displaying the patience to live in loving Christian submission
with a husband who spends far too much time clicking away at a keyboard. I
am truly blessed!

JamesWesley,Rawles
The Rawles Ranch
March 2009

1

CHAPTER 1
The Crunch

“... nuclear warfare is not necessary to cause a breakdown of our society.

You take a large city like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago—their water supply

comes from hundreds of miles away and any interruption of that, or food, or power

for any period of time you’re going to have riots in the streets. Our society is so fragile,

so dependent on the interworking of things to provide us with goods and services,

that you don’t need nuclear warfare to fragment us anymore than the Romans

needed it to cause their eventual downfall.”

—Gene Roddenberry

When the landing gear came down, Todd Gray gave an audible sigh of relief.
He was almost home. The seventy-seat Horizon Airlines Bombardier CRJ-
700 commuter jet started its downwind leg, with its engines throttled back to
low thrust. Todd looked out his window at the familiar rolling Palouse Hills, a
neat patchwork of wheat fields. This time of year they were shorn to a short
golden stubble.By early October even the straw had been hauled out.Just after
the plane touched down, the air brakes flipped up, and the engines reversed
with a roar. The plane wheeled to a stop at the tiny Pullman-Moscow air
terminal, just west of the state line dividing Washington and Idaho.When the
plane switched to external power, Todd unbuckled his seat belt, but didn’t get
up.He hated standing in the aisle,waiting for everyone to pull out their carry-
on bags,and waiting for what always seemed like an eternity for the cabin door
to open and for the passengers to shuffle out. So he sat and waited for the aisle
to clear. He closed his eyes, said a prayer, and considered what had gone on in
the last seventy-two hours.

• • •

The meeting had been called on short notice, and attendance was mandatory.
Everyone from mid-level account executives on up were there—even the field
office managers from as far away as Baltimore. Todd Gray and the firm’s two

PATRIOTS

2

other telecommuters were also corralled into the meeting by the management.
It was important,they said.So Todd dutifully packed his best suit.He drove from
Bovill to the Pullman-Moscow airport, took a commuter flight to Seattle, and
then a United flight to O’Hare.He rented a car and checked into the Marriott,
where he usually stayed on his quarterly trips to Chicago.That blew the entire
first day.With the two-hour time difference from Idaho, it was 7 p.m. by the
time he got to the Marriott and clicked on Fox News. There was lots of bad
news on the television. He watched the news for a half hour and then started
making phone calls and sending e-mails to his friends in Chicago.He spoke in
urgent terms.After a fitful night’s sleep, he sat through a full day of meetings
that started with a 7:30 a.m.working breakfast.This early start time for a major
meeting was unprecedented at Bolton,Meyer,and Sloan.
The firm had brought in two consultants for the daylong meeting, a Rus-
sian from Florida,and an Argentinean from NewYork City.Both were consid-
ered subject matter experts on high inflation. Both were well-seasoned
accountants, and both had lived through it in their home countries. Triple-digit
inflation. Todd heard from one of the mid-level managers that the consultants
were each paid twenty thousand dollars for the day.
He also mentioned that a third expert, from Zimbabwe, could not attend
due to a foul-up with his visa application. Todd regretted this, knowing that
with the recent 15,000 percent annual inflation rate and where ten zeroes were
knocked off the currency, the Zimbabwean would have had the most recent
subject matter expertise.
The Argentinean was on loan from Peat Marwick.His name was Phillipe y
Bordero, and he was far more informative than the Russian. He talked about
his experience in Argentina in the 1980s, when inflation ran as high as 100
percent per month as well as the economic crisis of 2002. He went on to
describe how president Raoul Alfonsin had instituted a thousand-for-one
currency exchange. He mentioned that his firm had to run daily calculations
to compensate for the inflation. Sometimes twice a day for the bigger
accounts. He went on at great length about how the firm would park money
in“day accounts”and shuttle money quickly into dollars to protect the money
from “El Inferno”—the inflation that was burning up the Argentine peso.
The Russian arrived an hour late, with loud apologies, claiming that his
flight had been delayed. Todd mumbled to himself, “Great. He could have
flown in last night, all expenses paid.We pay this guy twenty grand, and he
doesn’t even get here on time.”
The account executive sitting next to Todd snickered in agreement.
The Argentinean was cool and deliberate. In contrast, the Russian was a
manic speaker. He chattered about what things had been like for Russian
accountants in the 1990s. His discussion soon degenerated into a rambling

The Crunch

3

discourse on bribes: bribing the Moscow police, bribing the tax officials,
bribing the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB)—the main successor of the
KGB,bribing the Russian mob.
On some topics, the Russian was succinct. He said forthrightly,“You’ve got
to figure out which is the most stable currency, and exchange into that
currency as quickly as possible, before your local currency melts away.At one
point in time in Russia we had 1,800 percent inflation.It was madness to leave
it in rubles for more than a few days. For us then—at the time—the safe haven
was greenback dollars. For us now, I dunno. Euros maybe. Swiss Francs maybe,
but it’s got to be something more stable than these cruddy dollars.Latest figure
is 115 percent and climbing.To be fair to your clients,and to be fair to your firm,
you’ve got to get all incoming receivables out of dollars very,very quickly.”
Todd never caught the Russian’s name. It was something multisyllabic and
unpronounceable,ending in“ski.”One thing that the Russian asked soon after
he arrived made Todd sit up and take notice:“Where are the security men? No
guards in the lobby? You’ve got to increase security!You handle just account
ledgers and thumb drives and data disks now,but pretty soon you are gonna be
carrying around a lot of cash.So you need a couple of big guys with guns.Get
the biggest, meanest looking guys you can find.And mean looking guns. One
guard for the parking garage,and one or two for the lobby.Trust me.You won’t
regret it.”
After the catered lunch, there was a convoluted question from the far end
of the long conference table. It was about how they should go about calculat-
ing daily depreciation of a currency and precisely how aggregates should be
derived. Phillipe y Bordero was about to answer, but the Russian spoke first.
He said something that astounded Todd and everyone else in the room. He
said, “Just make something up that sounds reasonable.You’re talking about a
fast-moving target.Who gives a sheet? Make something up.”
At that point old man Meyer cleared his throat. He was obviously
perturbed. He retorted,“We aren’t going to ‘make up’ anything.We are going
to develop a set of accounting practices that will compensate for the inflation.
We will use elaborate computer modeling and projections if need be.” The
Russian was nearly silent for the rest of the day.It was clear that Mr.Meyer did
not get his twenty thousand dollars’ worth from the Russian. The day ended
with nearly as many unanswered questions as it had started.
Todd took a 5:30 a.m.flight back to Seattle the next morning.

• • •

Todd was shaken from his reverie by the stewardess, who was walking up the
aisle, making sure that none of the passengers had left anything behind. Todd
stood up and carefully extracted his one and only bag from the overhead bin.

He never checked luggage on his trips to Chicago.Todd was the last passenger
off the plane.
Since he didn’t have any checked baggage, Todd was in his Dodge pickup
within five minutes after getting off the plane.Parking was right out in front of
the little Pullman-Moscow air terminal. It was quite convenient, compared to
O’Hare with its lineal miles of glittering concourses, dozens of baggage
carousels, and several square miles of parking lots that charged twenty dollars a
day. Fifty minutes later, Todd pulled in the gate of his property. Shona ran
alongside the pickup, yipping and wagging her tail. It felt very good to be safe
at home.
Mary ran out the front door and gave him a long hug.They talked while he
unpacked.

• • •

When the Crunch came,it did not arrive without warning.By the turn of the
century,Federal spending was out of control,and the debt and deficit problems
were insurmountable. By 2008, with the global credit market in freefall, bank
runs and huge Federal bailouts were becoming more frequent.Collectively,the
bailouts were a massive, unstoppable hemorrhage of red ink. The debt and
deficit numbers compounded at frightening rates. But it was too agonizing to
confront them, so they were ignored. A report by the Congressional Budget
Office was alarming. It said that just to pay the interest on the national debt for
the year,it would take 100 percent of the year’s individual income tax revenue,
100 percent of corporate and excise taxes, and 41 percent of Social Security
payroll taxes.Just before the Crunch,interest on the national debt was consum-
ing 96 percent of government revenue.
The debt piled up at the rate of nine billion a day, or fifteen thousand a
second. The official national debt was over six trillion dollars. The unofficial
debt, which included “out year” unfunded obligations such as entitlements,
long-term bonds, and military pensions, topped fifty-three trillion dollars.
Even the official national debt had ballooned to 120 percent of the gross
domestic product and was compounding at the rate of 18 percent per year.
The Federal government was borrowing 193 percent of revenue for the year.
The president was nearing the end of his term in office. The stagnant
economy, rising interest rates, and creeping inflation troubled the president.
Publicly, he beamed about having “beat the deficit.” Privately, he admitted that
the low deficit figures came from moving increasingly large portions of Federal
funding“off budget.”Behind the accounting smoke and mirrors game,the real
deficit was growing. Government spending at all levels equated to 45 percent
of the Gross Domestic Product.In July,the recently appointed chairman of the
Federal Reserve Board had a private meeting with the president. The chair-

4

PATRIOTS

man pointed out the fact that even if Congress could balance the budget, the
national debt would still grow inexorably,due to compounding interest.
The president didn’t let trifles like ledger sheets and statistics get in his way.
The economy was on a roll. The stock market was at an all-time high. It was
business as usual for his administration. Instead of reducing the growth in
government spending, he launched an immoderate bank lending stimulus
package, corporate bailouts, mortgage-backed securities bailouts, and another
extravagant round of his pet “infrastructure building” programs in inner city
areas as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In Europe, international bankers began to vocally express their doubts that
the U.S. government could continue to make its interest payments on the
burgeoning debt. In mid-August, the chairman of the Deutsche Bundesbank
made some “off the record” comments to a reporter from The Economist
magazine.Within hours, his words flashed around the world via the Internet:
“A full-scale default on U.S. Treasuries appears imminent.” He had spoken the
dreaded “D” word. His choice of the word imminent in conjunction with the
word default caused the value of the dollar to plummet on the international
currency exchanges the next day. T-bill sales crashed simultaneously. Starting
with the Japanese,foreign central banks and international monetary authorities
began to dump their trillions of dollars in U.S. Treasuries. None of them
wanted the now risky T-Bills or U.S.bonds.Within days,long-term U.S.Treas-
ury paper was selling at twenty cents on the dollar.
In short order, foreign investors at all levels began liquidating their U.S.
paper assets—stocks, bonds, T-bills—virtually anything denominated in U.S.
dollars.After some halfhearted attempts at propping up the dollar, most of the
European Union nations and Japan announced that they would no longer
employ the U.S.dollar as a reserve currency.
To help finance the ever-growing debt, the Federal Reserve decided to
make a tactical move. It began monetizing larger and larger portions of the
debt.The Fed already owned $682 billion in Treasury debt,which was consid-
ered an “asset” for the purposes of expanding the money supply. In just a few
days, Federal Reserve holdings in Treasury debt more than doubled. The
printing presses were running around the clock printing currency. The official
domestic inflation rate jumped to 16 percent in the third week of August. To
the dismay of the Fed, the economy refused to bounce back. The balance of
trade figures grew steadily worse. Leading economic indicators declined to a
standstill.
In reaction to the crisis,the lawmakers inWashington,D.C.belatedly wanted
to slash Federal spending,but were frustrated that they couldn’t touch most of it.
The majority of the budget consisted of interest payments and various entitle-
ment programs. Previous legislation had locked in these payments. Many of

5

The Crunch

these spending programs even had automatic inflation escalators.So the Federal
budget continued to expand, primarily because of the interest burden on the
Federal debt. The interest payments grew tremendously as interest rates started
to soar. It took 85 percent interest rates to lure investors to six-month T-bills.
The Treasury Department stopped auctioning longer-term paper entirely in late
August.With inflation roaring, nobody wanted to lend Uncle Sam money for
the long term. Jittery American investors increasingly distrusted the govern-
ment, the stock market, and even the dollar itself. In September, new factory
orders and new housing starts dropped off to levels that could not be properly
measured.Corporations, large and small, started massive layoffs.The unemploy-
ment rate jumped from 12 percent to 20 percent in less than a month.
The catalyst for the real panic, however, was the stock market crash that
started in early October. The bull stock market had gone on years longer than
expected, defying the traditional business cycle. Nearly everyone thought that
they were riding an unstoppable bull. From fifteen to twenty billion in new
mutual fund money had been pouring into the stock market every month.
The mutuals had become so popular that there were more mutual funds listed
than individual stocks.By 2009,there were 240,000 stockbrokers in the coun-
try. It was the 1920s, in déjà vu. Just before the Crunch, the Dow Jones Indus-
trial Average was selling at a phenomenal sixty-five times dividends—right
back where it had been just before the 2000 dot-com bubble explosion. The
market climbed to unrealistic heights,driven by unmitigated greed.
Soon after the dollar’s collapse, however, the stock market was driven by
fear. Unlike the previous crashes, this time the U.S. markets slumped gradually.
This was due to circuit breaker regulations on program trading, implemented
after the 1987 Wall Street slump. Instead of dropping precipitously in the
course of one day as it had in ’87,this time it took nineteen days to drop 7,550
points. This made the dot-com “bubble burst” in 2000 look insignificant. No-
body could believe it. None of the “market experts” thought that the market
could go down that far, but it did. Only a few contrarian analysts predicted it.
Finally, the government suspended all trading, since there was almost no one
buying any of the issues that came up for sale.
Because all of the world’s equities markets were tied inextricably together,
they crashed simultaneously. The London and Tokyo markets were hit worse
than the U.S. stock exchanges. The London market closed five days after the
slump started. The Tokyo market, which was even more volatile, closed after
only three days of record declines. Late in the second week of the stock
market collapse, the domestic runs on U.S. banks began. The quiet interna-
tional run on U.S.banks and the dollar had begun a month earlier.It took the
GDP—the“generally dumb public”—in America that long to realize that the
party was over.

6

PATRIOTS

The only investors that made profits in the Crunch were those that had
invested in precious metals. Gold soared to $5,100 an ounce, with the other
precious metals rising correspondingly. Even for these investors, their gains
were only illusory paper profits.Anyone who was foolish enough to cash out
of gold and into dollars after the run up in prices would have soon lost every-
thing. This was because the domestic value of the dollar collapsed completely
just a few weeks later.
The dollar collapsed because of the long-standing promises of the FDIC.
“All deposits insured to $200,000,” they had promised. When the domestic
bank runs began, the government had to make good on the promises. The
only way that they could do this was to print money—lots and lots of it.Many
Americans were already leery of Federal Reserve Notes due to successive
waves of changes in the large portrait currency that began in 1996.
Strange new money tints caused a subtle change in the American psyche.
The paper money didn’t look right. It looked phony. And, in essence, it was.
Since 1964, the currency had no backing with precious metals. All that was
backing it was empty promises. Rumors suggested, and then news stories
confirmed, that the government mints were converting some of their intaglio
printing presses. Presses originally designed to print one-dollar bills were
converted to print fifty and one-hundred dollar bills. This made the public
even more suspicious.
With the printing presses running day and night turning out fiat currency,
hyperinflation was inevitable. Inflation jumped from 16 percent to 35 percent
in three days. From there on, it climbed in spurts during the next few days: 62
percent, 110 percent, 315 percent, and then to an incredible 2,100 percent.
The currency collapse was reminiscent of Zimbabwe, just a few years earlier.
Thereafter, the value of the dollar was pegged hourly. It was the main topic of
conversation. As the dollar withered in the blistering heat of hyperinflation,
people rushed out to put their money into cars,furniture,appliances,tools,rare
coins—anything tangible. This superheated the economy, creating a situation
not unlike that in Germany’s Weimar Republic in the 1920s. More and more
paper was chasing less and less product.
With a superheated economy,there was no way for the government to check
the soaring inflation, aside from stopping the presses. This they could not do,
however, because depositors were still flocking to the banks to withdraw all of
their savings. One radio talk show host described this situation as “watching a
snake eat its own tail.”All that the bureaucrats inWashington,D.C.could do was
watch it happen. They had sown the seeds decades before when they started
deficit spending. Now they were reaping the whirlwind. The workers who still
had jobs quickly caught on to the full implications of the mass inflation. They

7

The Crunch

insisted on daily inflation indexing of their salaries, and in some cases even
insisted on being paid daily.
Citizens on fixed incomes were wiped out financially by the hyperinflation
within two weeks. These included pensioners, those on unemployment insur-
ance, and welfare recipients. Few could afford to buy a can of beans when it
cost $150 dollars. The riots started soon after inflation bolted past the 1,000
percent mark. Detroit, NewYork, and Los Angeles were the first cities to see
full-scale rioting and looting.Soon,the riots engulfed most other large cities.

• • •

When the Dow Jones average had slumped its first 1,900 points, Todd Gray
made his“mobilization”calls to the six members of his retreat group still living
in the Chicago area.He followed up with a multiple-addressee e-mail message.
There was no need to call Kevin Lendel. He had been coming over for dinner
and extended conversations for the past three evenings. Most of the group
members agreed to attempt to make their way to the Grays’ home in Idaho as
soon as possible.
The only voices of doubt came from the Laytons and Dan Fong.When
Todd first called Dan—before his trip back for the accounting firm meeting—
Dan listened to his full spiel, and then remarked,“Yeah, Todd, remember what
you did right after the 9/11 terrorist attacks?You went positively ape.You were
Chicken Little, and the sky didn’t fall, now did it? I remember the ‘emergency
meeting’ that we had at T.K.’s.You were really panicky.You even had Mary
loading magazines from stripper clips during the meeting,as I recall.Now how
do you know this isn’t just another false alarm?”
Dan’s doubts disappeared a few days later when he was on his way to work.
He slowed down when he saw a queue of people stretching a full block. It
ended at the doors of the First Chicago Bank on Columbus Avenue. “Oh
maaaan,”he commented aloud to himself,“It’s six o’clock in the morning,and
they’re already lined up. This looks way serious.” He remembered that bank
lines were one of Todd’s touted“warning signs.”
Turning the corner, Dan had to stop and gawk, along with several other
drivers.A man was smashing an ATM machine with a tire iron. The machine
was obviously either out of cash or had been shut down by the bank.The man
was still in the process of venting his rage with the tire iron when Dan drove
away. The food rush started that same day. Supermarket shelves were
completely emptied in a coast-to-coast three-day panic.

• • •

8

PATRIOTS